Americans do not have...
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Americans do not have a good sense of priorities. Our mad quest for wealth has led us to create a society in which 1 out of 2 of us has low-income status. We are preoccupied more with the gross national product and the yields on our stocks than the fact that 15% of us actually dwell in poverty. We have the resources to do something about this but timidly sit on our duffs. The parable of the talents is about people with resources who do nothing with them. It is like Benjamin Franklin once wrote: "Hide not your talents, for us they were made, what's a sundial in the shade?"
"No good having gifts if you don't use them. John Calvin offers good guidance on how to use what we've got: '... no manner of life is more praiseworthy in the sight of God, than that which yields some advantage to human society' " (Calvin's Commentaries, Vol. XVI/2, p. 444).
Modern neurobiology has found that the life of faith is the best way to get us over our hang ups and to prod us to use the gifts we have in the manner Calvin proposes. It seems that when people are paralyzed, unable to act like the slave with the single talent, they have an overactive basil ganglia (the part of the brain's center that integrates feelings, thought, and movement). But meditation and spiritual exercise, activating the brain's prefrontal cortex, slows down the basal ganglia to a healthy level (Daniel Amen, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, pp. 82-84, 99ff).
"No good having gifts if you don't use them. John Calvin offers good guidance on how to use what we've got: '... no manner of life is more praiseworthy in the sight of God, than that which yields some advantage to human society' " (Calvin's Commentaries, Vol. XVI/2, p. 444).
Modern neurobiology has found that the life of faith is the best way to get us over our hang ups and to prod us to use the gifts we have in the manner Calvin proposes. It seems that when people are paralyzed, unable to act like the slave with the single talent, they have an overactive basil ganglia (the part of the brain's center that integrates feelings, thought, and movement). But meditation and spiritual exercise, activating the brain's prefrontal cortex, slows down the basal ganglia to a healthy level (Daniel Amen, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, pp. 82-84, 99ff).
